Pros
• Hottest place to be in social media right now • Pre-IPO • Pretty directionless, so you can chart your own path. • Everyone has a voice in meetings - the very structured and polite nature of Chinese culture impacts interactions - a formal agenda is almost always present, a clear leader, and everyone's opinion is asked. It's nice for people who don't ordinarily volunteer to speak.
Cons
• Very strange, secretive culture. I did not anticipate how large of the role would be 'ByteDance' (parent company) vs. TikTok. No knowledge sharing across orgs (e.g. side of business that makes money and/or user side). • Nickel & dime with salary - TikTok is rapidly hiring and is somewhat at the advantage of being the 'hot' place + send low-ball offers (I was borderline offended when I got my first offer; nearly 75% less than what I was making at the time) • Wouldn't bank on an IPO (at least anytime soon): In salary negotiations,, they focused on the 'pre-IPO stock' as being key in the total compensation package (so they could pay you less in direct cash). In all honesty, I would not be surprised if this company never went public. The amount of information they would need to disclose would be radically different from how the company operates today. They were set to IPO a while back on on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (to appease the Chinese government), but this got axed amid the anti-trust investigations towards Alibaba, etc. • High turnover - a fast growing company is great, but a fast growing company with fast turnover is a sign. After losing several people on my team (also - my recruiter quit while she was working with me!), it definitely impacts morale. Few are committed for the long-term. • Non-existent culture: If you're coming from another big tech company, don't expect anything like what you had previously. Whether or not the Google's of the world are actually committed to their mission statement is up for question, but ByteDance's mission (which does not exist) would be 100% growth at all costs. It feels a bit brutal. • China-based: This was probably the most jarring part when I first began. Everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) is in Mandarin – emails, internal chats, documentation. I would estimate 90% of engineering teams sit in China, so communicating with them is nearly impossible due to 1) time difference and 2) language barrier. This, of course, impacts every team (as we are reliant upon them to build what is needed). • Working Hours/Expectations: Aside from the fact that the China-based teams are regularly *required* to work on weekends to balance 'holidays', working with these teams means late night/early morning meetings all the time. If you're up for that, great - if you have kids or just would prefer to not start work before 7:30am and end at 8:30pm, I would be cautious. • No organizational structure - ByteDance believes in a 'flat culture' (which does not work for a 100k personal company) - you have absolutely no way at all to know who works on what. Onboarding was a total nightmare because of this - you just have to speak with people who are more tenured to know who does what.